Madison Commons (https://madisoncommons.org/category/city-life/page/2/)
Free Bikes 4 Kidz Madison will collect gently used bikes on Saturday, Jan. 12, as the first phase of its third season. The bikes will then be refurbished and donated to 2,500 area youth later this spring. Founded in 2016, Free Bikes 4 Kidz Madison (FB4K) gave away some 400 bikes in its first year. In 2018, they were able to refurbish and give away 1,100 bikes.
Members of Madison’s Hmong community are hosting a lunch for residents to celebrate the holidays together on Friday. The holiday lunch will be held in the lower level of the Catholic Multicultural Center, and starts at noon. The lunch, which is the first event Hmoob KajSiab will host during the winter holidays, follows up the program’s event around Thanksgiving. Hmoob KajSiab works with elderly Hmong, Cambodians and Miao to help them socialize and address mental health issues. “KajSiab” means peacefulness and calm and encapsulates the idea of being free from stress, tension and worry.
Community Shares, a partner of Madison Commons, recognizes two volunteers each month. The volunteers come from Community Shares' member groups and are selected for their service to the community and to community issues. Jake Hardwood, Rape Crisis Center
Jake Hardwood volunteers with the Rape Crisis Center (RCC). At the RCC, Hardwood has dedicated his efforts to the Safer Bar program where he helps educate employees of Madison businesses on the subject of sexual violence intervention. As a volunteer, he has assisted in the training of staff at alcohol-serving establishments to help them better identify sexually aggressive behavior.
The City of Madison recently launched a new website to report storm-related problems following the historic flooding in late August. More than 10 inches of rain fell on Madison over the course of eight hours on August 20. Immediate flash flooding occurred, and Madison’s lakes swelled to historic highs. Lake Mendota rose 16 inches, and Lake Monona rose more than 10 inches above it’s record elevation. Some areas of the city saw five-feet deep flood waters.
Describe a time when you felt like a part of your identity (your race, your gender, your job) was being profiled or stereotyped. What was the experience and how did it make you feel? That was the question for residents and police who attended a listening circle on the North Side of Madison on Wednesday night. As the night wore on it became clear that everyone has a story about how they’ve been made to feel profiled. Stereotyped.
The Mellowhood Foundation’s Summer Initiative is a paid summer program in the southwest Madison Meadowood neighborhood that teaches a large age-range of children about independence and real-world responsibilities. The initiative draws on the knowledge students already have from school, while also teaching them skills such as independence and self-determination. Mellowhood student Amaria has learned valuable lessons through the program, such as “working hard, getting good grades, and failing from time to time.”
The initiative focuses on team-building through activities such as gardening and group prayer. Students work together to develop menu plans using the food they grow and are served lunch and dinner. There is also an emphasis on helping students improve in core academic subjects like math, science, and English.
Community Shares, a partner of Madison Commons, recognizes two volunteers each month. The volunteers come from Community Shares' member groups and are selected for their service to the community and to community issues. Hannah Nowakowski, Sierra Club Foundation-John Muir Chapter
Hannah Nowakowski has been an invaluable member to the Sierra Club – John Muir Chapter. As a student intern for the organization, Hannah showed a strong commitment to the organization’s goals of protecting natural areas and promoting responsible use of the earth’s resources. Through her work as an intern, Hannah has helped champion efforts to move Wisconsin away from energy production that depends on dangerous oil pipelines.
They call themselves Las Hormigas Bordadoras, or the Embroidering Ants, for their town, San Francisco Tanivet in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, which their ancestors called “the town of the ants.”
They work with materials beloved in the U.S. — quilting and embroidery — but their “story cloths,” layered with patterned fabric and stitched words, tell stories that many Americans never hear: stories of the dangers and heartbreak of migration. And for the last week, two of these five artists have been in Madison sharing their work. A Warm Reception
At a reception in October at Central Library, visitors pored over the framed cloth scenes, which have been on display since August, and hundreds of quilted squares covering the tables. Many portrayed just one or two small human figures separated by a vast desert, border wall or the impassable distance between migrants and their homes. Border crossing and the necessity of migration are heavy topics for the Hormigas.
The City of Madison's Oscar Mayer Strategic Assessment Committee has completed phase one of potential special area plan elements of the strategic assessment for the reuse of the former Oscar Mayer headquarters and food production facility. The initial phase consisted of regional positioning analysis, public participation on the key issues, future vision and redevelopment objectives of the location, and examination of the existing conditions in the area of the Oscar Mayer plant. The Oscar Mayer plant was forced to end production in 2017, and the plant employed more than 4,000 workers in Madison at its peak. The vision developed by Madison officials leverages the corridor’s “unmatched infrastructure capacity and location between the airport and downtown to rise as a regional economic hub. Physically and economically woven into the diverse surrounding neighborhoods, the transit-oriented, employment centered, mixed-use district is now the inclusive gathering hub of the northside.”
The redevelopment objectives from of the area are to maintain housing affordability and minimize displacement, to leverage the corridor’s existing infrastructure and building stock, and to ensure economic recovery boosts diversity in ownership and local businesses.
Artists from a Madison-based veteran art collaborative have planned a month-long exhibition of contemporary veteran art set to take place throughout November. The exhibition, called “In Good Company: An Exposition of Contemporary Veteran Art,” was organized by Yvette Pino and Ash Kyrie with the Veteran Print Project. According to Pino, founder of the Veteran Print Project, the exhibition will use several modes of art to visualize the many, varying experiences of veterans in the United States. Pino said the project, which features work from dozens of artists, veteran and non-veteran alike, aims to “bridge the gap” between civilians and veterans. “This project is a way to use visual art to prompt conversation, about not only the military experience, but about shared human experience,” Pino said.